Forum Moderators: goodroi
Personally, the tipping point for me was the announcement of the book scanning (so, what? 2005/6 or thereabouts?). That for me was the straw that broke the camel's back and it's been downhill since then.
Where do you stand on Google's current position? Would you like to see their dominance cut back, their forays into OS dev, mobile, browsers, etc foiled? Or are you happy that the company is still evil-less and everything's hunky dory at Mountain View?
Oh, and Merry Christmas!
Aside from that I have serious privacy and data retention concerns and have begun my switch away from their products. Deleted my calendar items, delete my G Docs, deleting GMail stuff where possible, etc. I'm on the lookout for alternatives for pretty much everything. I've stopped using Analytics on most of my sites (hopefully have it off all them soon), etc.
For me there was no "one thing" that changed my views on the GORG. I'm switching from them because of many things. To be honest I was skeptical as soon as they became a publicly traded company because I realized their ultimate goal was to make their shareholders happy. It wasn't until 2009 where I really decided enough was enough.
2010 will be my year of diversification. GORG is getting too big and in some cases arrogant. Hopefully someone can come out with something that truly competes with AdSense...
I had begun liking Google in summer 1999, when someone showed me their simple but efficient search interface. I saw their rise, and I still thought they were good folks.
Very first doubts came with their IPO; I felt that their stock was overhyped and overpriced. But investors needed the next bubble, and so they threw their money at Google, despite their weird share structure.
Second thoughts were coming in 2005, after joining Adsense, when I realized that Google provided next to no hard information on how they actually came to the amounts they were paying out. I was baffled, but no - Google was really serious about showing just daily totals. This was my personal "tipping point". I realized that Google was really intransparent, despite their motto "don't be evil".
New acquisitions and products came along, DoubleClick, Youtube, Streetview, Chrome Browser, Google Books, just to name a few, and recently Google DNS, Chrose OS, and the default personalization. The behaviour of the company began to resemble to a 500-pound gorilla, who heavy handed issued "life time bans" and decided to communicate just through automated messages, if at all. Then Schmidt uttered his classic "privacy" sentence, and I decided that "enough is enough".
I removed Adsense from our sites and wrote a handy guide to remove Google from your life. Now using and promoting just Bing and alternatives to Google, not because Bing is so much better (or because I love Microsoft so much), but because they are the lesser evil of the two giants.
Should Bing ever become as frightening as Google, I will move on. But it will be some time until then.
